Part V: Pioneers and heroes or a lost generation?

The final instalment in the five-part series My Father, His Firebombs and My Messed-up Sixties Childhood, in which Post reporter Peter Kuitenbrouwer describes growing up with a hippie father who was on the run.

Leaving San Francisco airport on Highway 1 North, I pass a billboard depicting The Beatles in 1969, the period of their longest hair and fullest beards. “Now on iTunes,” the caption notes. The Fab Four in California, framed by palm trees, feels profound. Let It Be. The 1960s live.

This is the road taken by so many hippies, who fled the Haight Ashbury scene after 1967’s Summer of Love, seeking a tranquil place to shed their clothing and drop out. Thousands settled in Mendocino County. One was my father.

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From the 1850s, loggers had dominated Mendocino County, known grandly as “The Redwood Empire.” They called the new arrivals “dirty hippies” and locked them up — including my father.

Today the redwoods are cut, the sawmills shut. The irony is that these days, the hippies are the establishment. So was my father right after all? Am I the son of a hero and pioneer?

In Ukiah, capital of Mendocino County, I pick up the Ukiah Daily Journal, whose biggest story is the county’s biggest industry: marijuana. From the front page stares Dan Hamburg, a hippie who moved here in 1971. Having served in the U.S. Congress, Mr. Hamburg recently won election as Mendocino County supervisor, the top elected post. He openly cultivates marijuana on his property. K.C. Meadows, the Journal editor, says anyone can now legally grow a pot crop.

“Marijuana has pretty much taken over the community,” says Ms. Meadows says. “I can go down to Medican on Perkins Street and say I’ve got a migraine and they’ll give [me] a medical marijuana card. And you can grow as much as you want, apparently.”

Not everyone is thrilled with this new reality. My father sired a daughter in Mendocino; she earned a master’s degree at Berkeley and now works in health promotion throughout Latin America. On my way up the coast, we share a meal at a Mexican restaurant. She does not live in Mendocino because there are few opportunities to make a living besides growing dope. “Many of my peers who have stayed or moved back end up cultivating marijuana.”

But many here view the hippies as visionaries. The Kelley House Museum in Mendocino today seeks to chronicle and preserve the hippie legacy.

“We have done a good job of cataloguing the logging era in our historical research facility,” Nancy Freeze, the executive director, tells me. “We’re now turning our attention to the 1960s. The first item in our collection is a macramé purse that someone made on a commune.” Keenly interested in my research, Ms. Freeze offers to waive the $9/hour fee to scour her Mendocino Beacon archives in exchange for copies of these articles. History, she suggests, will view favourably my father’s plan to firebomb the local logging company’s model home (he never actually threw a bomb).

“What kind of newspaper articles do you think they wrote in England about the founding fathers?” Ms. Freeze asks me. “Not very good, I imagine.”

In the 1960s, the “establishment” questioned the hippies’ rock music, communes, nudity and drug consumption. Yet in a 25-year study comparing 150 middle-class, two-parent married couples and 150 counterculture families, Dr. Thomas Weisner at UCLA tracked their childrens’ school achievement, peer relations, behaviour problems, drug use, as well as values and social attitudes, concluding that “contrary to some who had dire predictions regarding the children of the nonconventional or ‘hippie’ families, for the most part they seem to be doing as well or better than our comparison group.”

But most of those counterculture parents stayed out of jail, and focused on raising their kids, even if in unconventional ways. This is where my family tale parts company with a lot of other hippie childhoods.

Daisy Anapolsky, eldest child of Stephen and Reva Anapolsky, now lives in Virginia. Her story resembles mine; her father Stephen, arrested in 1969 with my father in a car filled with firebombs, has been in jail a number of times since. He is so self-centred, she notes, that in his autobiography, The Time-Juggler (Pacific Transcriptions, 2003) he barely mentioned his children. The book describes smuggling techniques and Swiss jails in great detail.

“The revolution came first,” she notes. “Children are only there when there’s a purpose for them, like when you want them to carry drugs for you on a plane.” She craved a normal childhood: “A Happy Days lunch box with a white bread sandwich in it. That’s all we wanted.”

Perhaps the pain would be easier to bear if we could say our fathers had actually achieved something with their revolutionary activity. But they were no good at that, either, as Ms. Anapolsky notes: “Al-Qaeda would have never had them.”

Dr. Jennifer Jenkins, Atkinson chair of early childhood development at the University of Toronto, notes that child-focused parenting produces better outcomes.

“Looking at how they develop cognitively,” she says, “When parents are more involved the kids end up with higher levels of achievement. Your dad had other priorities.” Still, she notes, “growing up is about having a balance between feelings of disappointment and

gratefulness.”

Adriana Barton, who lives in Vancouver, wrote an upbeat story a few years ago in the magazine Elm Street, called Growing Up Hippie, in which she describes how, with hippie parents, she was “desperate to be normal.” She recalls, “I begged my parents to buy me a lunch-box: a spanking new plastic one with a picture of Sesame Street or Barbie.”

Ms. Barton initially rebelled against this Buddhism and yurt lifestyle by becoming a top-drawer cellist and performing at Carnegie Hall. In a similar way, I rebelled against the rebelliousness of my parents: I paid my own way through McGill University, and later had a proper marriage, with both families present, and rings, officiated by a minister, with invitations, tuxes, registry at The Bay and cake.

My mother, Marianne Dekking, herself a free spirit, nonetheless picked up the slack of rearing us, with her second husband. I interviewed my mother at her farmhouse north of Montebello, Que. Having raised five children and shed two husbands, she now lives essentially alone (at present she rents one room to a young woman) on her rolling, 250-hectare farm, most of it covered by forests. She has lived here 40 years. We sat at her old pine kitchen table. She brewed Earl Grey tea and served Armenian coffee cake. During our conversation, her big orange cat climbed on my lap and fell asleep.

This is the farm on which my two elder sisters and I grew up; my father later settled on a farm across the Ottawa River. The symbolism is worthy of Greek theatre: my parents live quite close as the crow flies, but there is no bridge there. Each of my parents lives alone. Yet in contrast to my father’s collection of sagging stables and log cabins, overgrown garden and smouldering stove, my mother maintains dry stovewood, crackling fires, a clean, spacious home, food, electricity, running water and bountiful vegetable gardens.

Still, my mother sees the 1960s as a time of great achievement — the decade brought her spiritual awakening (she became a Hindu) and freedom from the shackles of Europe and convention. “It was a kind of a huge relief for me, to be finished with certain dos and don’ts, to kind of explore things.” She fears my account will malign the hippie era.

My parents didn’t much care about giving us a secure and stable childhood. My Mom argues that safety and stability are over-rated. With pride, she adds that her Québecois neighbours call her children “débrouillard” — self-reliant. There is truth in this. In addition, my mother raised us to realize that there are many ways to measure success. I took that to heart; journalism is not a get-rich-quick career. My parents taught me to question authority: as a reporter, I do so every day.

My mother is adamant of the positive contribution of the flower power generation.

“It was a time that I started to get into yoga and things like that,” says my mom, who spent 1967, the Summer of Love, in Haight-Ashbury (we were with our father in Vancouver.) “I’d go almost every day to Golden Gate Park and there’d be huge concerts, but they’d be free, and everybody was making music and everybody was dancing, and everybody was burning incense and hanging out with their kids, lying on the grass, instead of marching off to a job and the kid to daycare.”

After I mailed her a draft of my story, my mother wrote to me, “It’s not easy raising kids, is it? I think you are doing a wonderful job and only hope you will not be too protective of them. We all have to learn lessons and we all get bumped around in the process (like those stones they polish in moving jars).”

When I interviewed my father we sat in his tiny house as darkness fell. He warmed rainwater on the wood stove, and by the light of a lamp powered by a car battery, he washed the dishes, including thick, graceful handcast silver spoons with which his grandmother taught him to eat soup in Holland. I asked him, “If you had it to do over again, would you?”

He said he felt the hippies made the world better.

“You don’t remember the time before the Sixties,” he says. “The world changed in the Sixties. I think the consequence of the Sixties is that generally people are a lot less afraid than they used to be.”

Others are equally eager to see my father’s actions in the context of the times. On my return flight to Toronto from San Francisco, I tell my seat-mate, Jim, of my father’s arrest in California in the 1960s for a firebombing attempt. He notes, “There was a lot of that going around. My brother was arrested for firebombing city hall in the town where I grew up [Glen Cove, Long Island]. He served a month in jail.” Told that my father spent about 18 months in California jails, he says, “That sure is a lot of time for an attempt. I guess they were afraid of what he would do. It was the hippies against the pigs. For better or worse, that’s what it was.”

History must weigh other factors in judging my father. In a letter from Bilthoven, the Netherlands, to the courts in California on April 17, 1970, his mother, Magda Kuitenbrouwer, pleaded with authorities to pardon the third of her 12 children:

“The war was a terrible time for us: little money, hardly anything to eat, frequent bombing (a military airfield at 4 km distance), fright, evacuated children who lived with us for six months and the most horrible things happening all around us. This period has made a very strong impression upon Paul.”

Ron Blett, a longtime friend of my father’s who remains in Mendocino County, notes that, when the sheriff’s office raided my father’s campground in the forest, “Paul was flashing back to Holland and his father and uncle getting dragged out in the street.” That’s why my father snapped, he says.

Some in my family did not want this story told; they are embarrassed by my father’s criminal record and outlandish exploits. Yet I feel no embarrassment or shame. Ms. Anapolsky recommended I read Jeannette Walls’s memoir, The Glass Castle (2005); the book helped me a lot. From the maelstrom of her upbringing with a reckless alcoholic father and dreamy, disconnected mother, Ms. Walls constructs a tale of resilience and redemption. Similarly, Ms. Barton concluded Growing Up Hippie noting that, “as an adult I was happiest when life was a variation on a bohemian rhapsody.”

Some of this is true for me. An appreciation for nature, a passion for gardening, cycling, healthy food and the outdoors, an inquisitive mind — these are all attributes I got from my parents. I am grateful that with the help of my wife, years of therapy and yes, this newspaper, I have let go of enough anger and built up enough distance from the tumult to finally have some kind of relationship with my father.

After he read a draft of these pieces, Paul Kuitenbrouwer called to tell me that one of his younger daughters, who also read the draft, asked him whether he had ever apologized to his kids for his reckless behaviour in 1969. “I realized I had not. So here goes: I am sorry.” I later mailed him an updated draft; he mailed it back, marked up in blue pen and stained with coffee. His scrawls in the margins ranged from specific comments and clarifications to more observational thoughts and some elements of a mea culpa, of sorts. Of the beginning, he wrote, “in context, please,” noting that 1960s radicals changed history; among other things, “mass U.S. civilian bombing raids in Vietnam stopped.” He also noted, “I left you to your mother and stepfather. Had I given it more time, we’d be closer. Too bad, and yet who knows, when I thought of you I thought you’d be all right.”

Among his strengths, Paul Kuitenbrouwer has a raucous zest for life, knows the elements of a remarkable story and is an adroit carpenter. He taught me reverence for No. 8 Robertson wood screws and the proper way to hold a handsaw, with my index finger stretched along the blade. These are useful skills.